Leonard

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 20: Leonard

Leonard Resnikoff was buried at River View Cemetery on Southwest Macadam Avenue, a cemetery that occupied a hillside above the Willamette River, the graves arranged on the slope like seats in a theater, facing east, facing the sunrise, facing the city that Leonard had adopted in 1973 when he arrived from Leningrad with a suitcase and a tuning lever and a fork and three felt mutes and an ear that could hear a fly land on a piano string from thirty feet away, and Clara drove to the cemetery on a Saturday morning in mid-December, a week after the Brahms concert, a week before the last tuning, the last piano, the Bösendorfer, Mrs. Ashford.

She had not visited the grave since the spring. She did not visit regularly, did not observe a schedule, did not mark the anniversary of Leonard's death with a visit, did not bring flowers or stones or any of the tokens that the living leave for the dead, the gestures that are for the living rather than the dead, the dead having no use for flowers or stones or gestures, the dead having no use for anything, and Clara's relationship with Leonard's death was not ceremonial but acoustic — she heard Leonard in the fork, heard him in the lever's rosewood, heard him in the Steinway's bass, heard him in every piano she had ever tuned because every piano she had ever tuned had been tuned first by her ear and her ear had been tuned first by Leonard, and Leonard was present in the tuning the way the fundamental is present in the overtones, not visible, not separate, not identifiable as a distinct voice, but present as the foundation, the origin, the frequency from which the other frequencies were derived.

The cemetery was quiet. December quiet, winter quiet, the particular quiet of a place where the living came to visit the dead and the dead did not respond, the quiet of a one-sided conversation, and Clara walked along the gravel path to the section where Leonard was buried, a modest section near the eastern boundary of the grounds, and she found the stone — a flat granite marker, flush with the ground, the kind of marker Leonard had specified because Leonard did not believe in monuments, did not believe in the vertical assertion of the headstone, preferred the horizontal modesty of the flat marker, the stone that lay on the ground and let the grass grow around it, the stone that was part of the earth rather than a claim upon the air.

The marker read:

LEONARD RESNIKOFF 1934-2020 TUNER

One word. One profession. The epitaph that Leonard had chosen, the single word that described what he had been and what he had done and what he had cared about, and the word was sufficient because the word contained everything — the Leningrad Conservatory, the emigration, the house on Ankeny, the garage with the lathe, the Steinway at the Schnitzer, the Bösendorfer on Klickitat, the fork, the lever, the mutes, the ear, the thirty-two years, the pianos, the pitch, the A — the word "tuner" contained all of this the way a tuning fork contains a pitch, the information compressed into the object, the meaning stored in the form.

Clara stood at the grave and did not speak. She did not speak to Leonard when she visited, did not address the stone or the ground or the air, did not perform the conversational ritual that some people performed at graves, the one-sided dialogue with the dead, because Clara did not believe Leonard was present in the ground, did not believe the grave was a location where Leonard existed, believed instead that Leonard existed in the fork and the lever and the ear and the pianos, existed in the tuning, existed in the sound, and the sound was not at the cemetery, the sound was in the houses and the churches and the concert halls where the pianos lived, and if Clara wanted to be near Leonard she would strike the fork, would hear the A, would feel Leonard's presence in the pitch, in the reference, in the one fixed point.

But she came to the cemetery anyway, came today, came because the visit was not about Leonard's presence but about Clara's need to stand in a place that was formally associated with Leonard, a place where the association was explicit, was carved in stone, and the standing was a form of acknowledgment, a way of saying — not aloud, not in words, but in the body's language, in the posture of standing still at a grave — that Clara remembered, that Clara honored, that Clara was grateful.

She stood for ten minutes. The December light was low and gray, the clouds close, the air cold, and Clara's breath made small clouds that dissipated immediately, the warm air of her lungs meeting the cold air of the cemetery and dispersing, and the dispersal was not unlike the decay of a tuning fork's tone, the energy spreading, thinning, disappearing into the larger volume of the atmosphere.

She took the fork from her pocket and held it. She did not strike it. She held it in her hand, the steel cool against her palm, and she thought about the day Leonard had taught her to hear the difference between a pure interval and a tempered one.

She had been sixteen. It was a Saturday. Leonard had brought her to the house on Ankeny, to the living room, where an upright piano stood against the wall — not the Knabe, which Clara had bought later, but a Wurlitzer spinet that Leonard had acquired for practice, for teaching, for the small repairs and adjustments that he performed at home — and Leonard had sat Clara on the bench and opened the top panel and said, "I am going to play you two intervals. You will tell me which one is more beautiful."

He had tuned the piano to equal temperament — its normal tuning — and he had played a major third: C to E. The third beat at approximately ten beats per second, the rapid flutter of the tempered third, the sound of the compromise, and Clara had listened and heard the beating and had not thought about it, had not registered the beating as a quality of the interval, had simply heard a major third, the interval she had been hearing all her life, the interval that Chopin and Beethoven and every other composer had used, the interval that was the foundation of Western harmony.

Then Leonard had retuned the E — had lowered it by approximately fourteen cents, from the equal-tempered position to the just-intonation position, the position where the frequency ratio was exactly 5:4 — and he had played the third again: C to E, the just third, the pure third.

The beats stopped.

The interval was — Clara remembered this, remembered the sensation, the physical feeling of the pure third entering her ear for the first time — the interval was still. Was calm. Was resolved. Was the sound of two frequencies in exact agreement, the fifth harmonic of the C aligning precisely with the fourth harmonic of the E, the two notes not fighting each other, not beating against each other, not producing the flutter that the tempered third produced, but sitting together in a stillness that was — Clara had not had the word for it at sixteen, had not had the vocabulary — that was consonance, that was the sound of the overtone series agreeing with itself, that was the sound that the ear recognized as correct, as natural, as right.

"Which is more beautiful," Leonard had said.

"The second one."

"Yes. The second one is more beautiful. The second one is a pure major third. The frequency ratio is 5 to 4. The beats are absent. The interval is consonant. The ear hears it and says: this is right."

"So why don't we tune the piano that way."

"Because we cannot. If we tune the C-E third to be pure, the E will be fourteen cents flat of equal temperament. The E-G-sharp third will be fourteen cents wide. The G-sharp-C third will be — very bad. The three thirds must divide the octave equally, and in equal temperament they do, and each one beats at ten beats per second, and none of them is pure. If we make one pure, we make another impure. The purity of one interval is purchased with the impurity of another. This is the cost."

"What is the benefit."

"The benefit is that all twelve keys are equally usable. You can play in C major and you can play in F-sharp major and the intervals are the same. No key is favored. No key is punished. Every key is equally impure. Every key is equally functional. This is equal temperament. This is the system we use. This is the compromise."

"But the pure third is more beautiful."

"The pure third is more beautiful. And we cannot have it. Not on a piano. Not if we want to play in all twelve keys. The beauty is sacrificed for the function. The perfection is sacrificed for the versatility. This is the trade. This is the bargain. And the bargain is — " Leonard had paused, and the pause was unusual for Leonard, who did not usually pause in his explanations, who delivered his technical instruction with the steady pace of a person who had thought carefully about what he was going to say before he said it. "The bargain is fair. It is a fair trade. The beauty we lose is real. The function we gain is real. And the function allows us to play all the music — all of it, in every key — and the ability to play all the music is worth the loss of the pure third. Or it is not worth it. This is for each person to decide."

"What do you decide," Clara had said.

"I decide that it is worth it. I decide this every time I set the temperament. I decide it every time I tune a major third to beat at ten beats per second and not at zero. I decide that the function is worth the beauty. And the decision is — " he paused again, and the second pause was longer than the first, and Clara, at sixteen, had not understood the pauses, had not recognized them as the moments where Leonard's thoughts exceeded his vocabulary, where the man who had left Leningrad at thirty-seven with imperfect English was reaching for words that were not available to him in his second language. "The decision is a kind of grief. A small grief. A grief you carry every day. The grief of knowing what the pure third sounds like and choosing not to have it."

Clara had remembered this conversation. Had carried it for thirty-six years. Had heard Leonard's voice in it — the accented English, the formal diction, the precision — and had heard in it the philosophy that had governed Leonard's tuning and, through Leonard, Clara's tuning, the philosophy that the compromise was not a failure but a choice, that the impurity was not a flaw but a feature, that the trade was fair even if it was painful, and the pain was a small grief carried daily, the grief of knowing what perfection sounded like and choosing function instead.

Clara stood at the grave with the fork in her hand and thought about the small grief. She thought about the thirty-six years she had been carrying it, the grief that was present in every tuning she had ever done, in every tempered third and every narrow fifth and every wide major sixth, the grief that was the tuner's constant companion, the knowledge that the tuning was a compromise and that the compromise was necessary and that the necessity did not eliminate the grief.

And now there was a larger grief. The grief of the hearing loss. The grief of the declining ear. The grief of the frequencies fading, the cents blurring, the resolution diminishing. And this grief was larger than the temperament grief because the temperament grief was a choice — Clara chose to tune in equal temperament, chose the compromise, chose the function over the beauty — but the hearing grief was not a choice. The hearing grief was imposed. The hearing grief was the body doing what the body did, which was age, decline, fail, and the failure was not a choice but a condition, not a trade but a loss, not a bargain but a theft.

But.

Clara stood at the grave and held the fork and thought: but.

But the hearing grief and the temperament grief were related. Were connected. Were expressions of the same underlying truth, which was that perfection was not available, that the pure interval and the perfect ear were both beyond reach, that the work — the tuning, the listening, the craft — was always done with imperfect tools on imperfect instruments in an imperfect world, and the work was valuable not because it achieved perfection but because it achieved function, not because it reached the ideal but because it worked within the real, and the real was compromise, was impurity, was the equal temperament of existence, every frequency slightly wrong so that every frequency could be used.

Leonard had said: "The bargain is fair."

Clara thought about this standing at Leonard's grave. She thought about whether the bargain of her hearing loss was fair — the loss of the high frequencies in exchange for — what. In exchange for nothing. The hearing loss offered no benefit, provided no function, served no purpose. It was not a trade but a taking. It was not equal temperament but entropy, the universal tendency toward disorder, the second law of thermodynamics applied to the cochlea.

And yet. And yet Clara had gained something in the year since the diagnosis, something that was not a benefit of the hearing loss but a consequence of it, something that the hearing loss had not provided but had revealed, the way the removal of a wall reveals the room behind it — and the thing that had been revealed was this: the hearing had never been the only thing. The ear had been the primary tool, the dominant sense, the faculty on which Clara's professional identity depended, and the ear's dominance had obscured the other faculties, the other ways of knowing, the other resources that Clara brought to the tuning — the twenty-eight years of experience, the knowledge of each piano's history and tendencies, the understanding of the physics and the mechanics and the materials, the relationship with each client, the memory of each room's acoustics, the intuition that was not mystical but empirical, the accumulation of a hundred thousand observations into a judgment that was more than hearing, that was knowing.

The hearing loss had revealed these other resources by making them necessary. When the ear could no longer do the work alone, the other resources had stepped forward, had been recruited, had been pressed into service, and they had served, had contributed, had shown themselves to be more substantial, more reliable, more durable than Clara had known, and the discovery of their substantiality was — not a gift, not a compensation, not a silver lining — but a fact, a datum, a measurement that Clara added to her inventory of what she had, and what she had was more than the ear, was more than the hearing, was the whole of herself, diminished in one faculty but present, still, in all the others.

She looked down at the stone. TUNER. One word. The word that described Leonard and that described Clara and that would, in time, describe Yuki, and the word was the same for all of them, the word did not change, the word was like the fork, a fixed point, and the word would continue to mean what it meant regardless of the condition of the ear that served it, regardless of the century, regardless of the technology, regardless of everything, because tuning was tuning, was the act of listening and correcting, the act of bringing the out-of-tune into tune, the act of returning the drifted pitch to the grid, and the act was the same whether the ear that performed it was Leonard's extraordinary ear or Clara's diminished ear or Yuki's young ear or any ear that could hear the beats and judge the intervals and turn the pins.

Clara put the fork back in her pocket. She looked at the grave one more time.

"I'm stopping, Papa," she said.

She had not meant to speak. She had not planned to address the stone. But the words came out, came out quietly, came out in the flat, factual tone that Leonard would have used, the tone of a measurement, and the words went into the cold December air and dispersed the way her breath dispersed, spreading, thinning, disappearing.

"I'm stopping because the ear is no longer sufficient. You would understand. You stopped for the same reason. The metric is different — you lost a specific partial, I'm losing a range — but the principle is the same. The ear must hear what the ear must hear, and when it cannot, the tuner must stop."

She paused. The cemetery was quiet. The December light was low.

"I'm giving the lever to Yuki. She has the ear. She has the hands. She will be good. She is already good. She will be better."

Another pause.

"I'm keeping the fork."

She stood for another minute, the cold air on her face, the stone at her feet, the fork in her pocket, the city visible below the hill — the bridges, the river, the buildings, the houses with pianos in them, the pianos waiting for tuners to come and tune them, the endless cycle of drift and correction that was the life of a tuned piano in a changing world — and then she turned and walked back along the gravel path to her car and drove home.

At home she sat at the kitchen table and took out the fork and held it and looked at it and thought about Leonard's lesson — the pure third and the tempered third, the beauty and the function, the grief and the choice — and she struck the fork.

A440.

The sound was there. The sound was Leonard's sound and Clara's sound and the anonymous Leningrad tuner's sound, the sound that three people had produced from this one piece of steel, the sound that was the same regardless of who struck it, the sound that was the reference from which everything else was measured, and Clara held the fork and listened to the sound and felt, in the listening, the presence of Leonard, not mystical, not ghostly, not the presence of the dead but the presence of the teaching, the presence of the lesson, the presence of the words — "the bargain is fair" — and she held the fork until the sound decayed and the kitchen was silent.

Then she set the fork on the table and went to the workroom and took the box from the shelf and put the old notebook in the box and closed the box and put it back on the shelf, and she went to the kitchen and took the new notebook from the bag and set it on the table next to the fork, the notebook and the fork, the thing that would go to Yuki and the thing that would stay with Clara, the record and the reference, the data and the pitch.

One week remained. One piano. The Bösendorfer.

Clara went to bed. She slept. She did not dream, or if she dreamed she did not remember, and in the morning she woke and struck the fork and heard the A, and the A was the A, and the day began.